


Tracking.  1/1.

by punky_96



Category: The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 13:10:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14521272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punky_96/pseuds/punky_96
Summary: Re-post from LJ.Goes with Slayed fic.  Jacqueline has some healing to do.PM comment + "This House" by Alison Moyet





	Tracking.  1/1.

_**Tracking**_  
  
     How long must I be punished?  How long must I see her and think of her only to draw back fingers that won’t stop feeling and a heart that won’t stop beating?  How long will I track Miranda Priestly across my heart and across the ocean?  
  
     We were young, so very young then.  Paris, the city of lights, but the home of the heart:  hearts that swell with love, excitement and promise; and hearts that hurt, hunger, and hunker down behind windows that they can’t bear to look through.  
  
     Miranda always saw everything.  She saw the details and the long-term creation that would come from those carefully selected and arranged details.  Her heart was vibrant and she lit up a room with her buoyant heart.  For a time I basked in that glow.  She and I, together with Nigel, earned our stripes.  It was natural for me to mix business with pleasure and Miranda made for the sweetest professional life I would ever experience.  Her light lit up my soul and made me think beyond the ambition I had to get to the top as soon as possible.  
  
     With her I would waste entire afternoons walking along the river, kissing as if we had no cares and no other desires, except for each other.  I allowed myself these small distractions because she would always share late night coffees with me as I crunched out the next deadline.  Miranda always put me to bed with a kiss and a caress.  I did not know that it was real for her.  I did not know that she did not play games with her heart the same way that I strategized how to get ahead.  I did not know that I had inadvertently fallen in the river of love as I walked beside it hand in hand with her.  
  
     I did not realize it.  
  
     Until I drowned in it.  
  
     Suddenly the bright woman that I had known was no longer there in the mornings.  The bed was cold and somewhere deep inside my bones I knew that it was cold in here—inside my bones and heart.  Her buoyancy had been my shelter and her love had been my true heart’s desire.  
  
     I saw a way to the top of French Runway.  I had a shot and took it.  
  
    The collateral damage was the love of my life that I had not realized and her beautiful light going out so that no one would see it again.  
  
     Miranda retained her eye for detail and the vision of the future, but she also learned to strategize and prioritize in a cold and calculating way that came from me.  I caused her to dampen her light to the world and only ever to let a few in again and I caused myself to lose the one thing that had come to mean everything to me without my own realization of it.  
  
     I was at the dinner where she was announced as Editor-in-Chief of American Runway.  I congratulated her and received the most painful slap I had ever endured as she air kissed my cheeks and then dismissed me as her assistant told her the name of a business man who was behind me.  The cold washed over me and my stomach fell between my feet as she passed over me like I had never existed in the first place.  I watched her greet him and I saw the hunger in her eyes.  The dragonlady that she had become was a foreigner to me, but the image of the beautiful was trapped there beneath her skin.  
  
     Of course I had known that she had married, moved on, more than once and with children to prove it—I knew this.  I had seen photographs of them together.  I saw what the headlines had begun to say about her over the years.  I had sent a card when the twins were born.  
  
     But seeing this calculating joy in Miranda’s eyes in person for the first time while my unrequited love for her burned bright behind my eyes was too much, too painful.  
  
     I looked down at my hands knowing that they were dirty, sticky with my own ruin.  I knew, too, that her make over was a defense against the world that I had shown her.  It was a defense against the hurt I had caused her heart.  
  
     Nigel came over then and smugly asked about French Runway.  
  
     I vowed to never see Miranda again.  I promised myself to let go.  I promised that I would lose myself.  I tried like hell to wash away my heart and mind.  It was a fool’s goal to pursue and I was the biggest fool in the land.  I could not be happily lost in my empty empire.  Runway was not just my little sphere in France, but it was instead tied to American Runway, Elias-Clark, Irv Ravitz, and the fashion the world over.  I was left in my maison only to be haunted by how her absence had made it a hovel where no one could ever make a home.  I was cold in my maison, and my work was no less warming.  I ruled French Runway with an austere fist that had come to rival Miranda’s in time.  Although to be truthful, I think that her style mirrored what I had done to her.  She never struck against me, although I wish she would have.  
  
     I vowed to never see her again, and then doggedly and relentlessly tracked her.  I threw myself into her path like a dog chasing an ambulance over and over again.  
  
***  
  
     I buddied up with Irv, and I made a point of attending every function I could on behalf of Runway in order to catch a glimpse of her.  Hotels in London, New York, Los Angeles, anywhere in the world that I could slide into her sphere even if for only a moment.  The glacial indifference in time became a smug dislike which I took as progress.  If she hated me—then I existed.  If she hated me there was a reason for it, and that meant our past really did happen.  If there was a problem, then I could someday hope to over come it.  
  
     At the benefit I knew that she had planned to leave before I arrived.  That was why I made my schedule public—I wanted her to have an end time in mind so that I could arrive and assure a moment with her.  
  
     When I saw her second assistant a cold draft of ice stabbed into my heart.  Wincing with the pain of it I greeted her in our customary fake air kisses and disdainful remarks about how wonderful it was to be re-united once again.  Miranda does not want hangers on.  Miranda does not have two assistants so that she can surround herself.  She spends her time trying to only associate with the best and to separate herself from those who are not worthy and/or who would hurt her.  I have been judged as both not worthy and someone who would harm her.  I still know her.  I know the woman that shared my bed.  I know the woman who revealed herself to me.  This second assistant was a new feature of her life, a new allowance of space and time.  
  
     It hurt when she ignored me in favor of that business man.  
  
    This slayed me.  
  
    Nigel caught my eye that night.  I wanted to speak to my old friend.  I wanted his comfort.  All I could think to tell him was ‘I am losing.’  Losing at every turn and in every way.  The surface of French Runway was fine and I was secure.  He would know the untold story without me even saying anything.  He would have been able to comfort me, even as I hid my head to the wall.  He would have known what to say so that I could face another day.  
  
     This assistant was beautiful and full of promise like we all were so long ago.  Her youth, doe-eyes, and innocence could be molded by Miranda into the woman that I never was.  I knew Miranda saw that, even if she didn’t know who this woman could be to her yet.  I did.  I saw it then.  
  
     An angry stripe flared up along my back saying, “If something can break you—it is best to destroy it.”  I wanted to destroy Miranda more than I ever had in the many intervening years.  She had picked up this little wisp of a girl and let her in.  After years of building fences and keeping guards at the gate Miranda was going to sweep up this slip of a girl and I could see it before either of them.  
  
     It was clear as day as I watched her lean backward as the girl whispered into her ear all evening.  I saw the glow on her skin and the unmistakable glimmer in her eyes.  
  
     I wanted to claw out my hawk like eyes before I could see anymore.  
  
     In the morning before my plane left, I called Irv to set a plan in motion to destroy Miranda.  She broke me more and more everyday and seeing her with this woman would destroy me—so it was best to shut her down.  There would be no happy fairy tale ending, because there would be no fairy tale.  
  
***  
  
     Paris…  the plot with Irv foiled.  Miranda stepped around me again.  
  
     And yet I saw her girl escaping.  
  
     I followed.  The brunette hair shimmering in the sunlight and tears tracking down her face.  I knew that look and recognized that particular walk as one left Miranda unknowing what had happened to the heart until it was too late.  
  
     She was Miranda’s new girl.  The one that brought a joy to her eyes I hadn’t seen since the day she realized what I had done.  My mind raced as I tracked her and caught up to her. Christian had introduced me to her at the party.  What was her name, this New Emily…  Andrea.  Andy, she had corrected Christian and laughed—only Miranda called her Andrea.  I gave her a knowing nod and she blushed.  
  
     In a flash I saw Andrea’s body below mine.  I saw her roll and dip under my touch.  Then I knew it was her, comprehension made things clear.  I knew that I could hurt this Andrea.  I knew that this stranger’s body beneath mine would not help me and would only hurt her and Miranda once again.  Had I not learned my lesson of hurting Miranda already?  And yet Andrea was so tempting.  I closed my eyes and I could see her eyes looking up at me, her smooth skin below me with that blush creeping across her skin again.  When I opened my eyes I could see Miranda.  I could feel her hands on my hips as she moved me where I she wanted me to go and her eyes as they bore into my being and carved her name on the back of my heart.  Even as I approach Andrea and remember Miranda all I know is that ‘I am losing…’  
  
     I blink again and then I am at the young brunette’s side.  She threw her phone in the fountain and left her world behind.  I pushed aside the din of lovers’ jousting in my head and focused on her.  I wanted to know this woman—the only woman in 20 years to potentially unravel the dragonlady.  
  
     For some reason the girl knows me and still tells me everything.  She didn’t want to be like Miranda after seeing her defend her position in the most ruthless of ways.  She tells me that Miranda said she saw a great deal of herself  in her.  She tells me that she didn’t want that and she walked away.  When she cried, I cried with her.  She would never understand why I would, but she seemed to believe my sympathy was genuine.  I could see why this one had wormed her way into Miranda’s heart.  I could see glimmers of the old Miranda and even myself in this slip of a girl—who saw the fire of the dragon and chose to walk away while she still could.  Something in me snapped and I wanted to take her more than I had wanted anything in a very long time.  I think that this woman may hold the same allure for me that she held for Miranda.  Andrea’s timeless beauty has not been soiled by the corruption of this world.  As I went to reach for this stranger’s body, a flash of Miranda’s hurt eyes the day she confronted me blinded me.  So I sent her to Catherine’s maison instead of taking her to mine.  It could have been a moment of comfort as both of our worlds crashed down around us.  She might have even thanked me for it.  For what?  To get back at Miranda for not loving me after I betrayed her twenty years ago?  It had been so long and I knew I would feel connected to Miranda if I bed her, but I knew that in the end no one could take her place, no one could shelter me from her gaze.  
  
     Miranda arrived at my house and my heart ripped itself in two and through itself at her feet.  She looked for the girl.  She called out to her in desperation in my house.  My ears burned as I heard Miranda call “Andrea?”  It was such a mournful tone.  And yet I still loved her.  I still wanted her and I still let her pull from me the love that I had willed to die, that just wouldn’t leave me alone.  I could not believe she was touching me once again.  With her eyes and then with her hands.  I was undone.  Undone and wanting.  
  
     And then she pulled out, pulled back, pulled away.  And she left me with sticky thighs in this hovel that no one could ever call a home.  
  
     I was left in the knowledge that indeed twenty years later there was no one to take her place, and no one would shelter me.  I would hide my head against the wall and never be sure of how to face another day.  The wound hurt even more twenty years later as I watched her walk out the door once again.  As I thought about her words and her fingers inside of me I realized two horrible things.  One:  she had placed me with James Holt based in New York.  Two:  I would be that much closer to her, and that much further away.  
  
     I had a feeling New York would be the coldest place on the planet for me as I was trapped within Miranda’s sphere.  Then I wondered was I tracking Miranda, or was she tracking me?  More painful than the throb between my legs where her hands had been was the fire of hope that sprang up once again in my failed heart of hearts.  Maybe instead of James Holt, NYC I should go charter Runway Antarctica?  
  
***  
  
 **End**

 

 


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